CHRISTMAS -TAKE TWO

 

I'll bet few of you know that this year Christmas comes on Tuesday, 7 January.  This is good news if you can't wait for Thursday, 25 December 2025. I am, of course, speaking of the  “original" Christmas, the one 200 million Greek and Russian Orthodox Christians celebrate, 13 days after Catholics and Protestants make merry. Now, as to why there are two Christmases, well, that has to do with the way theology seems to have been invented specifically to start arguments.

The first successful calendar that we know of was adopted over 6,500 ago by the 18 amalgamated city-states we know as the Sumerians. Being farmers they started their year in the spring, with each of their months beginning with sunset on the night of the new moon. This lunar calendar proved so popular it was adopted with slight modifications by everybody, including a small group of highland Semitic sheep herders known to themselves as the Yehudi – modern English translation being “the Jews”.

The Jewish spring was marked by the birthing of their sheep, what they called the Pesach. Fourteen days into the first Hebrew month of Nisan, at the full moon, they drained the blood of one of their first born kids. That's a baby sheep. The body was then burned, the rising smoke being offered up as a sacrifice to their god Elohim or Yahweh, to ensure he would keep them in milk, wool and lamb chops for the coming year. But, just about the same time as the invention of the calendar, the flocks of many of these Hebrews started dying.

Maybe it was disease and maybe a drought, but these Jewish bands were reduced to seeking work around the Egyptian settlements in the Nile river delta, where they were forced to exchange their Sumerian lunar calendar for an Egyptian solar one, and their mutton for bread. And the first Egyptian bread grain which ripened each spring, about the Nisan full moon, was barley. Now, barley doesn't rise well with yeast. This meant that every spring, when the stockpiles of wheat and rye grains ran short, the Jews were reduced to eating the hard, flat, unleavened barley bread. After leaving Egypt, or, as the religious fanatics described it, “escaping”, the spring Pesach was relabeled the Passover Festival.

Over the next  couple of millennial the Jews established a homeland called Israel, where they were  attacked by the Philistines, the Babylonians, the Egyptians, the Akkadians, the Hittites, and eventually the Romans. Every new conqueror forced the Hebrews to adopt some of their culture and calendar. 

And as is common with occupied people, the common folk dreamed of a messiah or Christ, who would save them from their oppressors, foreign and Jewish. Over time this produced a seemingly endless stream of messiah candidates. Most were loonies, but a few were dangerous enough that the upper crust Jewish Pharisees felt forced to eliminate them. And it was because of those few that before we got two Christmases, we got two Pesach-es – later renamed Easter.

See, the Romans, who were occupying Israel in the first century, had just stitched together a combination solar and lunar calendar championed by Julius Caesar and enacted on The Kalend, or the first morning of the new month of January, 47 B.C.E.  By Roman law all debts and taxes were paid on the Kalends of each month, including the Temple Tax the Jews paid so they would be excused from sacrificing to the Roman gods.

This Temple Tax was paid to the Roman Governor in the capital of Jerusalem, a city of between 60 and 70,000 people. During Passover, the city had to accommodate another 5 to 10,000 pilgrims in town to sacrifice at their temple. This produced a lot of taxable income for everybody, but with a crowd that large, you were guaranteed at least one Christ-wanna-be a year. 

Which is why, the Christian holy book could be very specific about the date when the most successful Christ, Jesus ben Joseph of Nazareth, was nailed to a cross. He was killed, theologians now figure, about 3:00pm on Friday in the 33^rd year of the common era,   or about 3 hours before the start of Passover that year.  Except killing this Christ only added to the Pharisse's problems.

These Christians kept insisting their dead guy was The Christ sent to reform Judaism which pissed off the Pharisee, who  saw no reason to reform a religion they were running.   Also, all reformers made the Romans nervous, which pissed off the Pharisee even more. A decade after Jesus' crucifixion, the Jewish King Agrippa beheaded the cult's new leader, Jesus' brother, James. 

The next leader, also named James but called "The Just" to separate him from James the dead,  tried to avoid giving the Pharisee any reason to cut off any more heads by strictly obeying Mosaic law for 20 years. However, the Pharisee eventually decided to kill James the Just anyway. So they threw him off the Temple roof. And when that didn't kill him, they had him beaten to death.

But there were other, even more disruptive zealots around, and in the year 66 C.E., bad Roman government and all these revolutionaries set off the First Jewish war, which lead to the Kitos War and then the Bar Kokhba revolt, which ended in 136 C.E. 

This 80 years of violence so pissed off the Romans they destroyed the Jewish temple, then burned and sacked the entire city of Jerusalem, and then outlawed Judaism entirely. The only way for Christianity to survive this Roman repression was to form their own religion, adopting the Julian calendar and inventing a new theology they called Christianity as they went along.

As figured by Professor Rodney Stark, of Baylor College, devotees of Christianity surpassed the “symbolically weighty figure” of 100,000 worshipers attending a hundred or so churches about the year 200 C.E., or 70 years after the last Jewish revolt. And yet, already, their new theology was starting to encounter problems. 

In the year 189 C.E., Rome, received a new bishop, or elder of this new quasi-Jewish church. We know him only by the name of Victor, and that he came from North Africa -  perhaps he was a Berber. We can assume Victor was devout, but we know he also was combative and arrogant. First, he had started calling himself “the Pope”. And secondly, was the way he tried to handle the Quarterdecimani debate.

In plain English, it was “The 14” - as in the 14^th day of Nissan, i.e. the date of Passover. Less than fifty years after the death of Jesus, Polycarp, the Bishop of Smyrna, reminded his fellow Christians that the Paesch was a life giving festival well before it became the Jewish Passover. 

This made 16 Nisson - the second day after Passover – the perfect day to celebrate the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Which meant the common folk still had to know when Passover started. And Polycarp had been personally trained by the Apostle John, who had personally known both the living and the resurrected Jesus.  So, he ought to know when Jesus died and rose from the dead -at least to within a day or two.

But Victor and most western Bishops wanted to disconnect Christianity from Passover. Too Jewish, you know. That meant converting Jesus ben Joseph into a gentile, like the majority of the new Christian recruits. This was why the Sabbath was moved from the Jewish Friday at sunset and all day Saturday – the end of the week – to Sunday – the beginning of the week. And by using the Julian calendar, which most gentiles were familiar with, they could reenact the mystical Good Friday to Resurrection Sunday, every year. And that was something the “floating” Jewish Passover, which could come on any day of the week, and was favored by the eastern Christians, could not do.

So far, settling such theological issues had followed the example of the Pauline Epistles. The bishops exchanged letters arguing their case, until they were close to agreement. They then held conferences, called synods, which endorsed the new dogma. But bishops still within the Byzantine Empire, who spoke and read Greek, felt as qualified to determine dogma as the upstart Latin speakers from Rome. 

But Pope Victor, a Latin speaker,  now abruptly warned that any Christians who did not sever the direct connection between Passover and Easter would be excommunicated - thrown out of the church and denied Jesus' forgiveness.

Immediately a missive arrived from the proud Bishop of Ephesus. This was a large, wealthy city, so when Bishop Polycrates spoke, other Christians paid attention. He reminded Victor that many respected church leaders celebrated Easter on 16 Nisson, like, “...Philip, one of the twelve apostles....(and) John, who was both a witness and a teacher...and Polycarp in Smyrna...” and the seven bishops in his own family. Polycrates warned Victor. “ I...am not frightened by terrifying words.”  In other words, don't even think about excommunicating me.

Another dissent arrived from the Bishop of Lyon, France. Irenaeus was a Greek who had a strong record opposing “Judaizing” the new faith, which gave him street cred in this argument. Irenaeus cautioned Victor against asserting dominance, because that might start a civil war within the Church. Finally, Victor backed down. 

So,  for the next 800 years, everybody agreed to disagree on the date for Easter and about the power of one Bishop, whatever he called himself, to dictate to other Bishops. The eastern church read their liturgy in Greek, the Romans in Latin. And this divided church survived the fall of the western Roman empire and the rise of Islam, until 1053 C.E., when another hot head was elevated to Pope.

In that year, “Pope” Leo IX went nuclear on a small group of Greek Orthodox churches in southern Italy. Leo ordered them to either “conform” to the Latin Easter or close their doors. 

In Constantinople, the Ecumenical Patriarch, head of the local churches, Micheal I Cerularius, retaliated by dropping the same bomb on the Latin churches in his city.  And his city was far bigger than Rome.

The following year, 1054, Cardinal Humbert, led a Papal delegation to Constantinople to insist that Micheal reopen the Latin churches and acknowledge Leo IV as the supreme leader of the “Catholic”, meaning unified, church.

Oddly enough, Micheal said no.  Whereupon, everybody in sight excommunicated everybody else in sight. This exchange of “Ex” bombs escalated until it widened into the Great Schism, which has divided Christianity ever since. The two sides stopped talking to each other. The Latin churches continue to celebrate Easter on the first Sunday after the Paesch full moon, while the Greek Churches mark Christ's rising from the dead three days after Passover, whatever the day of the week that fell on.

A final bit of confusion was added in 1582, when Pope Gregory XIII introduced a new and refined calendar, which cut that year by 10 days. Initially it was recognized only in Catholic states. Protestant Britain did not make the switch until 1752, by which time the difference between the Julian and the newer Gregorian calendars had grown to 11 days. Russian, being Eastern Orthodox  did not accept the change until the revolution, in 1918, by which time the shift was 13 days. They were followed later by most secular governments.

But the Greek Orthodox Church, still pissed off about the Great Schism, have remained on the Julian calendar. Which is why we have two Easters, and why the Eastern Orthodox Christmas comes on  25 December, Julian Calendar, but also falls on 6 January, under the Gregorian calendar – 13 days later. Which gives us two Christmases.  Just remember that St. Nicolas, the inspiration for Santa Claus,  was a Bishop in the Eastern Orthodox Church. 

The Jews, of course, have stubbornly stuck to their own clock, insisting the year 2024 is actually the year 5785.  But that....is a story for another time.

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THE LIGHT FANTASTIC - Hanukkah

 

I wish I had been in the Alexandrian suburb of Eleusis, Egypt,  in July of 169 B.C. when for a few brief moments the past and future were divided by a single line in the sand.  

On one side stood the royal egomaniac Antiochus IV (above), whose army was just four miles from capturing the Pharaoh of Egypt. Standing in his way was one old man, the Roman ambassador, Gaius Popillius, armed with just a piece of parchment - a decree from “the Senate and the People of Rome”.   It ordered the upstart Syrian to turn his Slecuid army around, and go home.  

Antiochus IV was infuriated, and bluntly told the old Roman he had to consult his advisers.  Probably he intended on riding back to his cavalry and ordering them to run the old man down.  But Gaius would have none of that. Grabbing a stick the old man drew a circle around the King and insisted, if Antiochus stepped over that line without first agreeing to turn his army back,  it would mean war with Rome.  

It was the original line drawn in the sand, and for maybe the only time in history, it actually worked.   Antiochus IV turned tail and sulked off home. It came to be called the “Day of Eleusis”, and because of that day, we celebrate a holiday – just not the one you're thinking about, probably.

Antiochus IV was King of the Slecuid Empire, centered in Syria and stretching from India on the east and now to the border with Egypt on the west. He called himself Anticochus  Epiphanes, “God Manifest”, but behind his back he was called Epimanes -  “The Mad One”.  And as he sullenly retreated eastward across the Sinai, he got madder and madder.  

You see, some jackass in Judea had spread a rumor that Antiochus IV (above) had been  killed in battle.  Maybe the Romans had spread the story to weaken Antiochus in his rear, and maybe Antiochus had spread it himself, to flush out any trouble makers among his conquered peoples.  But whoever spread it, the hottest hot head in Judea, a religious fanatic named Mattathias ben Johanan, gathered about a thousand of his followers, and came came charging out of the hills to capture the Jewish temple in Jerusalem and drive the high priest Menelaus into the wilderness

Now, few people in Jerusalem would miss Menelaus. He had become high priest because his brother Onias had been high priest before him.  But when Onias had sent Menelaus to deliver the yearly taxes to Antiochus IV,  Menelaus had included a little extra from himself, as a bribe, and suddenly  Onias was no longer high priest,  Menelaus was. So you can see why Antiochus IV tended not to think very highly of the high priests of Judaism, and now, neither did the people of Jerusalem. Menelaus slipped a little more in public opinion when his brother Onias died while cleaning his sword (above) -  bad luck.  So the Jews of Jerusalem were not really sorry to see Menelaus now running for the hills.

But King Antiochus IV(above) was sorry.  Menelaus might have been a sniveling bottom feeder, but he was the King's sniveling bottom feeder.  And then there was that whole “got to show them whose the boss” dynamic going on.   And Antiochus IV had an army which  had been expecting a rich sacking of Alexandria, which the Romans had put the kibosh to.  So in the dog days of August 169 B.C., everything was pointing toward a very bad day for Jerusalem. And it came.

It seems – oops - somebody had left the city gates open. So the Slecuid army marched right in, as the hot headed Mattathias slipped out the back door.  First the Slecuid  soldiers stripped the Jewish temple of everything of value -  everything not already sold to pay taxes to Antiochus IV, or stolen earlier by the Babylonians and the Egyptians when they each sacked Jerusalem.  Really there couldn't have been that much left to steal.  But whatever was left, Antiochus IV took it. 

And then, according to the holy text, Second Macabbees, “And he commanded his soldiers to cut down relentlessly every one they met and to slay those who went into the houses.” That sounds like pretty much everybody.

The primary non-religious source for what happened was the Jewish radical turned Roman informer, Josephus.  He says that over three days Antiochus IV murdered 44,000 people in Jerusalem,  and sold another 44,000 women and children into slavery.  Antiochus IV then built a citadel right next to the Jewish temple, which he stocked with a permanent garrison.  Then he had the Jewish temple re-dedicated.  On the altar where Menelaus had sacrificed goats to honor Yahweh, the Greek priests now sacrificed pigs to honor Zeus.  Antiochus IV also issued a decree forbidding circumcision - (who was the lucky guy who got to check on that? ). It seemed the Jews had finally ticked off one King too many. Surely they had finally learned their lesson.

But, a year later human nature, or maybe it was Yahweh,  intervened.  In 168 BC, the rising empire of Parthia captured the Afghanistan city of Heart (Hair-it)(above). This was important because  the region around Herat was the bread basket of  Slecuid empire, and sat astride their primary trade route with India. We're talking a major loss of taxes, here.  So Antiochus IV had to turn eastward to deal with the upstart Parthians.  But he did not forget the troublesome Jews.  

He ordered his governor of Syria, a nobleman named Lysias  “to conquer Judea, enslave its inhabitants, utterly destroy Judea and abolish the whole nation." And in 167 B.C. Lysias dispatched four divisions to accomplish this task.

As they marched on Judea, Mattathias, who had reappeared (above),  now organized the faithful.  However, because he was a religious fanatic, Mattathias insisted that all his soldiers strictly adhere to Jewish law - that's what they were fighting for, wasn't it?  Unfortunately the Slecuid army did not recognize the Jewish Sabbath, and on a Saturday they attacked the first Jewish village in their way.  Following the law, and Mattathias' orders, the villagers refused to do any work on the sabbath, even refusing to lift a weapon to defend themselves.  All 1,000 of them were slaughtered. 

After this Mattathias was replaced as leader of the revolt by his son, Judah (above). And under him, the Jews decided to compromise on the religious issues and fight, twenty-four, seven.

It turns out Judah ben Mattathias was pretty good at it.  In 166 B.C. Judah fell on the Slecuid supply base at Emmaus, killing its 3,000 man garrison, capturing a huge cache of weapons and food, and forcing half the Seleucid army to retreat.  

A year later he beat the other half of the Slecuid army at Beth-zur, forcing them, again, to retreat.  It was battles like this that earned him the nickname of Judah the Hammer, or in Hebrew, Judah Maccabees.   

Shortly after this victory, word again arrived that Antioschus IV was dead.  Except this time he really was.  He'd been in Babylon, struggling to prepare a counter attack against the Parthians, when he suddenly went sick and dropped dead (above). He might have caught the plague, lots of people did then, , or maybe he got drunk and fell out of his chariot, or maybe it was Yahwah's payback,  but I think it even more likely, he'd been poisoned by the Parthians. In any case, his young son, Antiochus V, now inherited what was left of the empire.

Lysias immediately had himself declared Antioschus V's guardian, which put the Governor in charge of the entire empire. Or what was left of it. Lysias ordered an end to efforts to retake Heart, and in 165 B.C. he marched for a third time on Jerusalem. Third times the charm, right? 

This time Lysias came by the southern road, catching the Hammer off guard. This time Lysias actually laid siege to Jerusalem. This time it looked as if the clock had run out for the Jews. This time there was nobody to save them. 

And then out of nowhere appeared a guy named Phillip, (the royal governor of Babylon, actually), who claimed that on his death bed Antioschus IV had asked him, Phillip, to raise the king's son, now known as Antioschus V, AKA as The Eupator - son of a good father..  That would make Phillip the regent, not Lysias.  Lysias did not believe a word of it. Would you?  But the Romans did. So Lysias would have to deal with Philip’s army.  And one morning Judah looked out from walls of Jerusalem, and saw...nobody. The entire  Slecuid army and all their siege machines had mysteriously disappeared. It was a miracle. As long as you forgot about the whole Slecuid civil war going on.

Judah Maccabees ordered a a new altar built for the temple, and declared 8 days of “sacrifice and songs” for its re-dedication. The pigs and Zeus were out, The lambs and Yahweh were  back in. 

There was only one problem. Tradition said in re-dedicating the Temple required the temple's  menorah lamps to burn every night, all night, during the celebration.  But there was only enough olive oil for one night. What to do?

Now if it was me, I would have ordered the nine lamps on the menorah to be publicly lit at sundown each night, as usual. And then after the faithful had gone home to bed, the priests would quietly extinguish the lamps. This way, instead of burning through all the oil in one 12 hour winter's night, the lamps would burn for a about an hour each night, for eight nights. And I think that maybe that was what the Hammer did. But then, I am a non-believer. And priest are in the business of believing in miracles. And the truth is, miracles don't usually happen without a little help from somebody. Who that help comes from depends on who and what you believe in. Anyway....

It was the first Hanukkah, the first festival of the lights. Two thousand years later it is not a very important Jewish holiday, and about the only one in which women play a leading role. Each of the eight nights a woman first lights the “shamash”, the central candle or lamp, used to illuminate the entire ritual. On each successive night , the shamash is then used to light one more candle each night until all eight are burning. In each Jewish home they are displayed in a window or an exterior door, “to illuminate the house outside” the home. And as they do so, the women recite the Hanukkah prayer.

“We light these lights for the miracles and the wonders, for the redemption and the battles that you made for our forefathers, in those days at this season, through your holy priests. During all eight days of Hanukkah these lights are sacred, and we are not permitted to make ordinary use of them except for to look at them in order to express thanks and praise to Your great Name for Your miracles, Your wonders and Your salivations.”

Lysias defeated and killed Philip in 163 B.C.. But in 162 B.C. Lysias was defeated by Demetrius I, who had been Antiochus IV's older brother and Antiochus V's uncle. Being the older brother, Demetrius was supposed to have been made King first. But when their father died, Demetrius was being held as the official hostage in Rome. So it turned out Antiochus IV had been a usurper, which made his defeat in 162 B.C.,  payback. Demetrius executed both Lysias, and the boy king Antiochus V. Demetrius then tried to reconquer the Jews, but the Fighting Maccabees  held him off for ten years, until Demetrius was killed by a new usurper in 150 B.C. And that was finally the end of the Slecuid empire.

The next empire to come marching down the coast road of Judea would be the Romans. And they and the Jews would have their own problems, strongly reminiscent of the ones the Jews and Slecuid's had shared. They say some people never learn. But I think most people never learn, certainly not in the middle east.

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